1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to information processing systems, and more particularly it relates to user information management systems, and in particular relates to a method and system for maintaining an audit trail or log of actions maintained in such a information management system.
2. Description of Related Art
Technological advances in electronics has allowed for enabling increased functionality in smaller and smaller devices. Today's laptop computers have computational functionality similar to that of room-sized computers that existed in the 1970s. Even smaller electronic devices, generally known as personal information management (PIM) devices or personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, are becoming ubiquitous, allowing users to communicate with others and perform somewhat limited computational capability, such as entering and retrieving data into applications running on the PIM/PDA such as a calendar or to-do list application. In addition, with the merger of PIM/PDA devices and cell-phone technology, phone number and address lists including email addresses can also be maintained and managed with such devices. It is also possible to play interactive media files and games on such devices. Representative PIM and PDA devices include a Palm Pilot handheld device available from Palm, Inc. and a Pocket PC device available from numerous vendors such as Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, NEC and Dell, to name just a few.
Because of the small size of these personal devices, the ability of user's to co-act with such a device is generally more restrictive than co-action methods and techniques used by traditional computers such as desktops and laptops. For example, the keyboard is typically smaller (if one even exists at all) on a PIM or PDA than it is on a laptop computer. Because of this user co-action limitation, it would be desirable to reduce the amount of user actions, such as keyboard or stylus input, required of a user to co-act with a PIM or PDA device and its associated application(s).